Northeastern Megacity

The Northeast megalopolis, also known as the Northeast Corridor, Acela Corridor, Boston–Washington corridor, or BosWash, is the world's largest megalopolis in terms of economic output and the second most populous megalopolis in the United States with 52.3 million residents as of 2019.

Located primarily on the Atlantic Coast in the Northeastern United States with its lower terminus in the upper Southeast, the Northeast megalopolis runs primarily northeast to southwest from the northern suburbs of Boston to the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. It includes many of the nation's most populated cities, including New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Boston, Baltimore, and others, along with their metropolitan areas and suburbs. It is also sometimes defined to include smaller urban agglomerations beyond this, such as the Richmond and Hampton Roads regions to the south, Portland, Maine and Manchester, New Hampshire to the north, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to the west.

The Northeast megalopolis extends in a roughly straight line along a section of U.S. Route 1 and Interstate 95. As of 2010, the region contained over 50 million people, about 17% of the U.S. population on less than 2% of the nation's land area, with a population density of approximately 1,000 people per square mile (390 people/km²), compared to the U.S. average of 80.5 per square mile ² (31 people/km²). America 2050 projections estimate the area will grow to 58.1 million people by 2025.

French geographer Jean Gottmann popularized the term megalopolis in his 1961 study of the region, ''Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States''. Gottmann concluded that the region's cities, while discrete and independent, are uniquely tied to each other through the intermeshing of their suburban zones, taking on some characteristics of a single, massive city: a ''megalopolis'', a term he co-opted from an ancient Greek town of the same name that named itself out of aspirations to become the largest Greek city.

There are hundreds of colleges and universities in the region, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Penn, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and MIT, all of which are ranked among the top universities in the world.

Region

The megalopolis encompasses the national capital of Washington, D.C. and most, all, or part of 12 states, including (from north to south): Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. It is linked by Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 1, which start in Miami and Key West, Florida, respectively, and terminate in Maine at the Canadian border, as well as the Northeast Corridor railway line, the busiest passenger rail line in the country that serves Amtrak and several commuter rail agencies. It is home to 52.3 million people as of 2019, and its metropolitan statistical areas are contiguous from Washington, D.C. to Boston. The region is not uniformly populated between the terminal cities, and there are regions nominally within the corridor yet located away from the main transit lines that have been bypassed by urbanization, such as Connecticut's Quiet Corner.

The region accounts for 20% of the U.S. gross domestic product. It is home to the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the U.S. Supreme Court, the headquarters of the United Nations, the headquarters of ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, PBS, Fox, Comcast, The New York Times Company, ''USA Today'', ''New York Post'', ''The Wall Street Journal'', ''Newsday'', ''The Washington Post'', and ''The Boston Globe''. The headquarters of many major financial firms, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Fidelity, are located within the region, which is also home to 54 Fortune Global 500 companies and the U.S. headquarters for 162 of the world's Fortune 500 companies. The region is also the center of the global hedge fund industry, heavily based in New York City and the Connecticut cities of Greenwich and Stamford.

Population

History

Due to its proximity to Europe, the Eastern coast of the United States was among the first regions of the continent to be widely settled. Over time, the cities and towns founded on the East Coast had the advantage of age over most other parts of the U.S. However, it was the Northeast in particular that developed most rapidly, owing to a number of fortuitous circumstances.

While possessing neither particularly rich soil—one exception being New England's Connecticut River Valley—nor exceptional mineral wealth, the region still supports some agriculture and mining. The climate is temperate and not particularly prone to hurricanes or tropical storms, which increase further south. However, the most important factor was the "interpenetration of land and sea," which makes for exceptional harbors, such as those at the Chesapeake Bay, the Port of New York and New Jersey, Narragansett Bay in Providence, Rhode Island, and Boston Harbor. The coastline to the north is rockier and less sheltered, and to the South is smooth and does not feature as many bays and inlets that function as natural harbors. Also featured are navigable rivers that lead deeper into the heartlands, such as the Hudson, Delaware, and Connecticut Rivers, which all support large populations and were necessary to early settlers for development. Therefore, while other parts of the country exceeded the region in raw resource value, they were not as easily accessible, and often, access to them necessarily had to pass through the Northeast first.

Modern history

By 1800, the region included the only four U.S. cities with populations of over 25,000: Philadelphia, New York City, Baltimore, and Boston. By 1850, New York City and Philadelphia alone had over 300,000 residents while Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn (at that time a separate city from New York), Cincinnati, and New Orleans